


Frienemies

by QuinnyBee



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Spoilers, Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep Spoilers, Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance Spoilers, Kingdom Hearts II Spoilers, Not Canon Compliant - Kingdom Hearts III, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Written Pre-Kingdom Hearts III, in like 2015 lmao, nothing really overtly spoilery within but tagging to be safe, the Redhead Squad bromance is just really important to me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29981703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuinnyBee/pseuds/QuinnyBee
Summary: Having her boys home safe and sound is a relief; having to put up with their tagalong, not so much. But just because she doesn’t like him doesn’t mean she’s going to let him freeze his butt off on the pier.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	1. Matchsticks and Poison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The nights keep getting longer and Lea’s finding it harder and harder to live in the shadow of someone else’s demons.

Sunsets never looked as nice anywhere else as they did from the top of the train station clock tower. The air was clear and the horizon was the perfect smudge of orange-yellow-red; everything else had its importance put on hold the minute he sat down. Just for now, Axel thought as he drummed one heel idly against the side of the building, he wanted to think about how nice the sky looked, without having to wonder when it was going to fall.

Something blue dropped into his line of vision, hanging so close to his face he could feel the aura of cold hanging around it. He jolted and looked up to see Roxas dangling the sea salt ice cream in front of him as the boy took a bite of his own.

“Thanks,” Axel said, taking it. He felt a strong tug deep in the pit of his stomach that seemed like relief. But he and Roxas met there practically every day; why would today have been any different? Roxas offered no explanation, dropping without comment onto the ledge next to him and continuing to nibble his ice cream. Axel couldn’t help looking at the other boy every few minutes, the wrench in his gut worsening and turning sour every time. It was like he expected him to be gone, but Roxas not disappearing somehow made things worse.

“Sure is red today,” Roxas mumbled halfheartedly. He sounded exhausted and just as lost for words as Axel was.

“Yeah,” Axel agreed. He forced a grin. “Hey. Bet you don’t know why the sunset’s red,” he said.

“Light wavelengths,” Roxas replied immediately. “You told me that one already, smartypants,” he added with his own wooden smirk.

“Oh.” Axel deflated, adrift with nothing to say.

“Would’ve been nice if things could have stayed like this,” Roxas said, apropos of nothing in the hard silence between them.

The twist in Axel’s stomach vanished with a jerk, taking the bottom of his stomach with it. “Wh-What do you…?” he stumbled. This couldn’t be happening. He’d worked so hard to keep things the same as they’d ever been with Roxas, to make sure Roxas didn’t have to find out the things that would ruin it. There was no way Roxas could have found out on his own; and maybe it hadn’t been entirely altruistic to keep it from him but the kid was wrapped up in enough bad stuff on his own without going looking for trouble. Besides that, Axel was sure that everyone in the Organization was too wrapped up in their own circumstances to bother giving Roxas a straight answer if he got too curious. If Roxas wasn’t talking about that, though, what was he talking about?

“Even if we don’t have feelings, it was nice to feel normal,” Roxas went on as if Axel hadn’t broken in. He was letting on nothing, eyes focused on the red horizon as he mechanically ate his ice cream.

“What do you mean ‘was’? Nothing’s changed,” Axel said. His sudden panic was beginning to alchemize into irritation now; he had to put up with that navel-gazing nonsense enough from Saix without his other friend joining in as well. He turned a narrow glare on Roxas and opened his mouth to tell him to stop being so stubbornly obtuse and just come out with it already.

The words turned to a rasp in his throat and he felt his eyes widening on their own when he looked at Roxas. For a just a moment (though it had been a long enough moment to send a horrified jolt down his spine and turn him silent) Roxas had seemed to flicker and fade like static on an old television. Axel gaped as Roxas faded to something vague and translucent, then became roughly solid again as he spoke again.

“Did you really think it was going to last, Axel?” Roxas asked. His voice was still as flat as it had been, but a coldness had seeped in around the edges of the words.

“Don’t call me that,” Axel snapped, his mouth seeming to say words before his brain could figure out why, “I’m not Axel anymore, I’m just Lea now.” He hesitated, giving his head a hard shake. This had spiraled too suddenly away from making any kind of sense.

Roxas shrugged. “Who’s Axel?” he asked. “Who’s Lea? Is there really a difference?” He turned to face Axel for the first time as he said it and the wrongness of the whole thing seemed to amplify. It was Roxas, but somehow not at the same time. There was something indescribably off about the razor-sharp way his eyes focused, the tilt of his head too straightforward. “Sora,” Roxas said, biting off the word like a bad taste in his mouth.

“What?”

“You’re thinking about Sora, not me. You don’t change, you just forget. But who cares, right? It’s not like I was ever supposed to exist.” Roxas got to his feet, standing too straight-backed and serious on the ledge as he tossed the stick of his ice cream to the ground. One end bore a smeared crown and the word “winner” in block letters beneath the melted blue streaks.

“Wait!” Axel scrambled to stand, grabbing Roxas’s wrist before he could leave. “You know that’s not true, Roxas. You’re my best friend,” he said, the sharp stab of desperation in his chest making him sick to his stomach. He’d swore to himself that he’d keep Roxas safe no matter what, but he could feel the shards of that broken promise shredding him from the inside. Roxas let out a bitter snort that seemed to come from everywhere all at once, the boy beside him shimmering into static again.

“Your best friend?” It was Roxas’s mouth moving as the words came, but the voice was hard and hurt and female and seemed to come from directly behind him. It had the same faraway untuned signal quality Roxas kept taking on as it spoke again. “Axel,” the voice said, “how was I ever your friend? You don’t even remember what I looked like.”

“Who—?” Axel whipped around to look over his shoulder.. The voice worried at the back of his mind, as familiar as hearing an old friend talking in the next room over. There was no one behind him, however; just human-shaped smear against the stone side of the building that cast no shadow. He only had a moment to wonder on this, however. Without warning, Roxas wrenched out of his grasp with a burst of strength that caught Axel off guard. Axel stumbled off the ledge and onto thin air as the tower and his best friend and the sunset rushed away from his grip.

Lea landed with a smack face-down on the floor, arms pinned underneath him and aching from the impact. His legs had tangled in the sheets as he fell, leaving him half on the bed and half on the cold floorboards. Biting off a groggy swear he wrestled himself free and sat up against the bed with his forehead in one hand. So it was _that_ dream this time, he thought. His heart was hammering dully against his ribs in fading panic; it wasn’t a feeling he was used to just yet and it startled and sickened him every time he had reason to notice it. Lea closed his eyes and slowly, purposefully, went through The List in his head again.

He wasn’t at the Castle and he wasn’t in Twilight Town; he was in the Destiny Islands, given a place to rest his head through the indomitable charity of Sora—

_You’re thinking about Sora, not me._

No, Lea thought, gritting his teeth against the echo in his head. No, he wasn’t there anymore. He was here and he was _staying_ here. He was _Lea_ , not Axel, he’d left all that behind when he’d given the Organization up for good—

_Who’s Axel? Who’s Lea? Is there really a difference?_

Maybe there wasn’t anymore.

The walls of his room were too close all of sudden, pressing down on him from all sides and choking the air from his lungs. Lea struggled to his feet and wobbled through the door and out of the house. A shiver ran through him as the bracing predawn chill cut right through his thin clothes. It cleared his thoughts like a splash of ice water, though, the crisp clarity of it wiping away some of the nightmarish fog from his brain.

Wrapping his arms around himself to ward off the worst of the wind, Lea set off down the road that led to the beachfront. The pier wasn’t any kind of replacement for the clock tower, but sitting at what felt like the edge of the world still had a funny way of clearing his head. He was willing to try anything right now, if only to banish the voice in his head that was Roxas and not Roxas that kept repeating _you don’t change, you just forget_ over and over again.


	2. Frienemies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi and Lea talk about trust and solidarity and mostly agree to disagree.

The sound of a door opening and swinging noisily closed shook Kairi to semi-panicked wakefulness. She opened her eyes and did a quick headcount of her bedmates, heart skittering. Sora was sprawled against her side, snoring like a contented outboard motor; she could see the top of Riku’s head over Sora’s upturned shoulder, one of his arms thrown around Sora’s waist to tangle in the hem of Kairi’s shirt. The relief at the two of them still being where she’d left them was short-lived, however, as another door opened and shut downstairs and she heard footsteps outside through her open window. There was only one other person who could be shuffling around in this house, but Kairi couldn’t imagine why he would be up and walking around before dawn.

Grumpily, she extracted herself from the tangle of blankets and bedmates and looked out her window to see Lea (Sora insisted this was “Lea”, not Axel, and she’d rolled with it even though Kairi wasn’t entirely convinced the subtraction of eyeliner and addition of self-consciousness meant much) shuffling out across the street. He seemed to have wandered straight from bed, barefoot and dressed only in a pair of shorts and sleeveless shirt in the early-morning chill. Kairi sighed, caught between the strong urge to just give him up and go back to bed and an equally strong (if unwelcome) worry about him. He’d been an off-putting oddity from the moment they’d met, but ever since Sora had escorted him here and announced he’d be staying, Lea—Axel—whatever he called himself—had been acting very strangely. Watching Lea reminded Kairi of watching an actor in a stage play who kept forgetting to hit his marks. All of his reactions were either huge or completely flat, sitting on the surface of his face without ever sinking in. It didn’t seem to ease when he was on his own either; more than once Kairi had seen him down on the beach at sunset, sitting motionless and blank on the end of the pier and picking over a sea salt ice cream. Kairi watched as the retreating redheaded figure turned toward the beachfront and felt her grudging concern take over. If he was headed back there at this hour, Kairi thought as she left her sleeping boys behind and shambled down to the kitchen, he was at least going to need something to keep him warm.

Kairi gathered a couple of the thicker spare blankets from the hall closet, bundling them as small as she could to make them easier to carry. Shivering at the cold kitchen floorboards on her bare feet, Kairi started a saucepan of milk heating on the stove for hot chocolate. She was sure Sora and Riku would stay asleep for hours yet; they loved their late mornings and both of them could sleep through a hurricane. Still, if she had to chose between her boys having a lie-in safe at home and the two of them vanishing off into the ether without her yet again, she’d let them snooze the day away in a heartbeat. Kairi tipped half of the bubbling hot chocolate into Sora’s and Riku’s usual mugs (bright blue with “waking up is for quitters” written on it and plain white with a smiley face drawn on the bottom in permanent marker, respectively) and covered them with a dish towel to keep warm until the boys woke up; the rest she poured into her own pink tartan thermos for the trip down to the pier. Supplies gathered and feet slipped into sandals, Kairi made sure to close the door behind her as quietly as she could when she left.

As she’d expected, she found Lea sitting alone huddled on the end of the pier. He had his long arms wrapped around himself in a vain attempt to ward off the sea breeze and gave a grumbly sneeze as Kairi approached.

“You’re just asking to get a cold coming out here without a jacket,” Kairi said. Lea jumped and let out a squawk of surprise, which was cut off by Kairi dropping one of the blankets onto his head. She wrapped her own blanket around her shoulders like a cape and sat down on the edge of the pier next to him. Lea cocked an eyebrow at her from under the tumble of cloth.

“What are you doing up?” he asked. Kairi gave him a narrow look as she poured cocoa into the thermos lid for him.

“ _Somebody_ decided it was a good time to go outside and freeze half to death,” she said, pointedly not stifling a yawn as she did. She waited until he had bundled himself into the blanket before handing him the hot chocolate. “Why are _you_ down here so early?” Kairi added.

“Eh. Couldn’t sleep,” Lea said. There was a distance behind his eyes as he looked out over the water, spindly fingers flexing and tapping tuneless rhythms on the cup in his hands. The nervous fidgeting made him seem younger than he looked, Kairi thought, and almost fragile inside the lump of blanket. He took a sip of the drink she’d handed him and seemed to snap back to the here and now. “This is really good!” he said. It was the most enthusiastic she’d seen him since he’d arrived, and a traitor part of her felt pride in having brought an actual emotion out of him.

“Thank you,” Kairi said. “It’s my grandma’s old recipe. She always used to make it for me when it was cold or I got upset.” She hesitated for a moment, then went on, “I’ve seen you out here a lot lately.”

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah, I guess. There’s a lot of…stuff to think about,” Lea said. His mouth twisted in a wry sort of smile as he shot her a sidelong glance. “I get the feeling you don’t really like me being here,” he added.

“It’s not my favorite thing in the world, no.” Kairi winced a little at how sharp the words sounded coming out of her mouth, but wasn’t about to take them back.

“You don’t seem in a hurry to run me out of town, though,” Lea continued, raising one thin eyebrow and grinning at her a little too widely. Kairi frowned at him, then shrugged airily as if the thought didn’t appeal one way or the other.

“For whatever reason, Sora trusts you. And I trust Sora,” Kairi said flatly.

“Yeah, well. That might not be such a good call,” Lea said. “The him-trusting-me thing, not the you-trusting-him part,” he added quickly. “Not that I’m planning anything, I’m in this to stop that Xehanort weirdo and get Isa back to normal, that’s it. Got it memorized?”

Again came the sudden and surprising animation in his thin face, flashing from self-deprecating sarcasm to horrified realization to embarrassed bravado within a few seconds’ time. It was capped by an over-the-top toothy grin and trademark tap to his temple, which became in its turn a grimace that was not quite camouflaged by him taking a drink. Kairi hid a laugh behind a small cough; part of her wondered why it was the color-by-numbers automaton Lea and not this admittedly obnoxious but infinitely more entertaining version that came out more often. Lea raked a hand through his sleep-mussed hair and gave a long sigh.

“This ‘being nice to people’ thing isn’t as easy as Sora makes it look,” he grumbled petulantly.

“I wouldn’t hold myself to Sora’s level of being nice to people if I were you,” Kairi said, grinning in spite of herself. “He’s pretty unstoppable.”

Lea laughed, and Kairi was struck by how genuine this laugh sounded. It wasn’t the half-mocking bray when he spoke badly of himself or the cough of amusement he seemed to force when he didn’t know what to say, but a quiet awkward chuckle. Perhaps she shouldn’t have surprised to see him acting like an everyday human being with everyday human quirks, but hearing him laugh like that in the predawn grey struck her as oddly endearing.

“Yeah,” Lea agreed. “That Sora. He’s a good kid.” Again the curtain fell behind his eyes and he turned into a wan, pensive mannequin. Kairi chewed her bottom lip, eyes cast down at the shifting water between her dangling feet. Something in his tone made her wonder if he was trying to fend off the same ominous pressure that had been nagging at her recently.

“You feel it too…don’t you?” Kairi asked slowly.

“Feel what?” Lea replied. His tone was at-arms-length flippant, but Kairi knew the answer already from the way he’d stiffened at the question.

“With Sora, since he came home,” Kairi said. “I thought I was imagining it at first, but now I’m pretty sure I’m not. Sometimes he’ll be there and he’s just good old Sora, the same as he’s ever been. Silly, fun, dorky Sora. But sometimes there’s this feeling like…” Kairi shook her head, frustrated by the way her mind seemed to refuse to form the thought completely. “I don’t know. It’s hard to say, I guess.”

“Like a storm’s coming,” Lea said quietly. Kairi looked up at him. She was a little bit relieved to know that she hadn’t been imagining it, and someone else had noticed too; at the same time she wouldn’t have objected to finding out it was all in her head. Lea frowned, eyebrows pulling together in a deep crease. “Nah, that’s not it,” he amended slowly. “It’s like…the storm’s already here, and we’re all waiting for it to hit. Right?” He turned an expression of distressed hope on Kairi and she was sure she must have looked the same to him. His shoulders sagged as he let out a long breath.”Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of,” he muttered. “Do you think it’s just us, or have the two of them noticed too?”

“I’m not sure. I think Riku might have noticed something weird too,” Kairi said. “He’d never say anything, that’s not how he is. But I’ve seen him looking at Sora and he just looks…lost.”

“Lost?”

“Like he’s not sure what he’s looking at, and he’s scared to ask,” Kairi said. “I can’t really blame him. He spent so long alone in the Darkness beating himself up over and over for the things he did, he doesn’t want to start trouble again. Dumb boy.” She laughed weakly, shaking her head. “And Sora never lets anyone worry about him, even if he’s worrying about himself. Everything is either about the people he cares about, or it’s no big deal.”

A hard air blew across the water, making Kairi pull her legs up into her blanket cocoon against the sudden cold. Lea let out a muffled grumble, tugging his own comforter up over his head and peering out from the makeshift hood like a discontented redheaded owl. Kairi wanted to snort at him, but the growing tightness in the pit of her stomach made it harder to find things funny right now.

“He’s going to try to do this on his own.” It seemed too final out loud, but it had paraded out of her mouth before she could stop it.

“Yeah, probably.” The crease between Lea’s eyebrows made a reappearance. “We’re gonna have to put a stop to that, huh?” he said. The corners of his mouth tightened and he looked sidelong at her. “I mean, y'know. If you’re thinking I should be part of 'we’,” he added haltingly.

Kairi made a moue, head rocking from side to side as she mentally weighed the pluses and minuses of the thought. “To be honest, I’m still don’t think you seem very friendly,” she said. “You’re crafty and conniving and blunt to the point of rude, and Keyblade Wielder or not, you’re kind of a lazy jerk,” she added.

“Well, don’t sugarcoat it for my sake, princess!” Lea let out another surprised bark of genuine laughter and Kairi couldn’t help joining in, covering her mouth with her hand to stifle it. She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter, trying not to giggle through the seriousness of what she was trying to say.

“Despite that,” she said, jostling Lea with her shoulder when he seemed to be too caught up in his chuckling to listen. “You’re fighting for someone you care about, just like the rest of us. Something tells me life’s going to be complicated enough without us being at each other’s throats. Got it memorized?” she added with a grin, giving her temple a mocking tap. Lea smirked, snaking the hand holding his cup of cocoa out from under the protection of his blanket.

“Cheers,” he agreed with more solemnity than the grin spread across his face should have allowed. “All for one, one for all.”

“And no one gets left behind this time,” Kairi said. She tapped the rim of her thermos against his cup and the two of them drank to solidarity as dawn streaked the sky red and pink.


End file.
